How do I sub-edit a science article?

Sub-editing an article means making it readable, accurate and attractive — not putting words in the author's mouth — explains Peter Wrobel.

Scientists and science writers are always keen to communicate new ideas and developments. But they are not always the best judges of what their intended audience can absorb.

The
problem is common throughout journalism, where specialist writers tend
to assume that others share their knowledge. But it can be particularly
acute in science journalism
for two reasons: scientific specialisms often have an extremely narrow
focus, and most specialist writing is about things that are, by
definition, new, and therefore unfamiliar to many readers.

In
the course of commissioning such an article, an editor normally learns a
great deal about the story subject. Indeed, their understanding of it
may rival that of the intended author, and will probably be more
comprehensive than almost anyone's, apart from those involved in the
research itself.

All
this knowledge, however, already sets the commissioning editor apart
from the intended audience, whose first acquaintance with the topic will
be when they read the article. This is where the sub-editor comes in.

The
sub-editor can be seen as the reader's last line of defence. A
sub-editor's main concern is what the reader is likely to know before
seeing the article, and whether they will be able to understand the
article in the light of such knowledge. And the sub-editor's main task
is to ensure that the article is comprehensible to as many readers as
possible.

But
comprehension is not the only challenge. During the process of making
an article understandable, the sub-editor must also try to ensure that
it is readable, legally sound, ethical and written in a consistent
style. She or he must also make sure that it fits the space assigned to
it; that it has an enticing headline and good captions on pictures and
other illustrations; and that it is accurate — right down to the
spelling of the author’s name.

Keeping the reader's attention

While
it is only one of the sub-editor's tasks, ensuring that the article can
be easily understood is perhaps the most important. Sub-editors often
find it useful to start by asking how much people read of any given
article.

It
is often assumed that readers read everything. But this is far from the
case. Sub-editors have to work on the general assumption that 80 per
cent of readers will not get past the fourth paragraph of a printed
article, and 90 per cent will not touch the scroll button when reading
an article online.

It
is easy to understand why this happens. In a newspaper, for example,
every double-page spread is littered with headlines all designed to grab
the reader's attention — rather like a street market, with different
traders shouting out their wares. As their eye roves over the page,
giving it any excuse to hesitate — a word they don't understand, an
obvious mistake in spelling, grammar or fact — will break their
concentration. There are plenty of other stories vying for their
attention, and once their eye wanders off, it is unlikely to return.

In that sense, the sub-editor's aim is simple: that for any given story, the reader will read it all, down to the end.

To
achieve this, the sub-editor has to deal with elements that can break
the reader's concentration. Here we return to the sub-editor's many
tasks — with making the article comprehensible at the top of the list.
If a reader cannot understand what the writer is saying, there are
plenty of other articles to read, or plenty of hyperlinks to click on.

So
a sub-editor will assess every word (some quicker than others) to
ensure that the readers will understand it. And for any publication
aimed at a broad readership — SciDev.Net, for example, or New Scientist —
a sub-editor will assume that the average reader of any given article
is a non-specialist. After all, how much molecular biology will even the
average condensed-matter physicist understand?

Comprehension

So
what will a sub-editor identify as being incomprehensible to a
non-specialist audience? The first, and most important, rule of thumb is
that if the sub-editor cannot understand it, the non-specialist
audience won't understand it either.

Applying
this rule demands a certain level of self-confidence, however. Science
is full of hierarchies, social and otherwise, but one of the most
powerful is based on knowledge: the more you know, the higher your
status.

In this situation, sub-editors have to be willing to assert their ignorance. For a sub-editor, saying, "I don't
understand this" is not an admission of failure or inadequacy; it is a
vital first step in turning the article into something that is easily
understood.

At
this point, writers — and even editors — can become a little
frustrated, and may exclaim, "But everyone knows xxx!" The sub-editor
has to remind the author that "everyone" can't know xxx, since they
don't. Or that what everyone has learnt in the past is not important —
it's what everyone remembers that counts.

Along
with this requisite self-admitted ignorance, sub-editors also need to
keep alert to changes in 'common knowledge'. Ten years ago, for example,
the word 'genome' did not fall into this category, even within that
section of the public closely interested in science. Today it is
understood, at least up to a point — and normally that point is far
enough for readers to understand what the article is about (although
there are still circumstances in which the term may need to be
explained).

Likewise,
you may not need to explain what a protein is. But you would want to
explain what the proteome is. It is all a matter of judgment, something a
sub-editor requires in abundance.

Readability

The next key ambition of a sub-editor is to make an article readable, which is not the same thing as making it comprehensible.

Something
may be clear, but dull; or clear, but difficult to take in at normal
reading speed. Readers find it hard to maintain concentration if a text
is dull or difficult, and they'll quickly move on to the next headline.
Readability is what will keep them going to the last sentence.

Sometimes
your word processor can help to check this. I am writing this article
using Microsoft Word, which — along with other standard word processing
programs — has a function for checking readability. All readability
checkers do fundamentally the same thing: use algorithms based on word
length (or number of syllables), numbers of words in sentences and,
sometimes, numbers of sentences in paragraphs, and then tell you how
difficult the article is to read.

The
level of difficulty is often expressed as the number of years you'd
need to have amassed within the American education system to understand
the piece.

In
my first draft, the result was 11 years, which means, roughly, that the
average 17-year-old could understand it — a little high for easy
reading. Newspapers tend to aim a bit lower. The reading ease so far is
53.9 — on a scale where 100 is very easy, 60 is 'plain English', 40 is
'difficult' and anything under 20 is 'very difficult'. For comparison, a
paper on molecular biology in Nature will typically rate between 20 and 25!

The
principle behind all readability checkers is simple: neurological
perception. However familiar a long individual word might be — take
'demonstration', which has 13 letters and four syllables — once you
start filling up a sentence with long words, the eye and the brain
simply cannot read them easily.

This
creates particular problems for sub-editors working on science stories,
since science is full of long words — 'epidemiology', for example, or
'crystallography'. The solution is to go short wherever possible: short
words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

This
is often easy to do. Words such as 'demonstrate' can easily be
shortened to 'show', or 'consume' to 'eat'. Other words can be cut out
entirely — the word 'very', for example, is almost always unnecessary —
while words such as 'however' can often be changed to 'but', or just
omitted, and 'furthermore' can profitably be transformed into 'and'.

The
next trick is to look for 'passive' sentences — for example, "It has
been shown by Swedish scientists that…". Passive sentences are
notoriously common in science writing, as this is the way most
scientists seem to have been trained to write papers. They slow
sentences down, and put a brake on readability. One-way of keeping a
check on them is with the Word grammar checker, which will tell you what
percentages of your sentences are passive.

Once
a sub-editor has pinned passive sentences culprits down, they need to
turn them around to make them active — "Swedish scientists have shown
that…". This reduces the number of words from eight to five — a
reduction of 37.5 per cent!

Accuracy

The
next responsibility of the sub-editor is to ensure that everything in
an article is accurate. Every word must be spelt properly, all grammar
and punctuation must be correct, and all facts should, in principle, be
checked — within reason.

Spelling,
grammar and punctuation are important because errors in them can alter
the sense the writer intends to convey. In these matters, you can never,
ever, rely on your computer's spellchecker or grammar checker.

A
spellchecker will not tell you whether you have spelt the word
correctly, merely that a word can be spelt in a particular way. So it
will not discriminate between 'discreet' (prudent, modest, perceptive)
and 'discrete' (a common word in science, meaning 'distinct'). Nor will
it tell the difference between 'checker' and 'chequer'.

In
addition, the rules of English grammar are relatively flexible, which
means that they are not, yet, reliably susceptible to machine checking.
So sub-editors must become masters of their language.

Another
reason for getting these things right is that when they are not, they
distract the reader. A sub-editor wants the reader who has read one
group of words to go on to the next, not to stop and compose a letter of
complaint to the editor about a grammatical slip.

Factual
accuracy is even more important. Inaccurate facts can do quite a lot of
damage: distract or mislead the reader, reduce the reader's trust in
everything else, and damage the reputation of the publication. Serious
errors may demand a correction in the next issue, which takes up time
and space.

So
sub-editors need to check everything they can, especially the names of
institutions and people. It's the least they can do for scientists.
After all, it's a tough job — you labour unnoticed in the lab, your
family has no idea what you do, then one day your name appears in print
and you have something you can show your mum. So at this point, you want your name to be spelt correctly!

Numbers
are a frequent source of error in writing about science. It's easy to
make a slip of the keyboard and end up with the wrong order of
magnitude, or a wrong numeral, which is why sub-editors check numbers
for common sense.

The
same goes for internal consistency. If a writer says a new grant scheme
will spend $500,000 on six disciplines, and then lists only five
disciplines, or gives sub-totals that add up to more than $500,000, then
clearly something is wrong. At this point it is often only the writer
who can say exactly which number is wrong, but the sub-editor has
identified a mistake — normally without having to know anything about
the subject!

There
is much more to sub-editing, of course. When an article leaves the
sub-editor, it must be legally sound (whole books have been written
about the criteria that determine libel), its content must be ethical,
it must fit, and it has to have a good headline and alluring captions.

And
everything must be in a consistent 'house style' — a standard way of
spelling, or writing down numbers, or giving dates or references, for
example — not least to avoid distracting the reader by writing
'bloodstream' in one sentence and 'blood-stream' in the next. In short,
when an article leaves the sub-editor, it must be entirely fit to print.

A last word

Finally,
a word of warning to over-ambitious sub-editors. We are not the
writers, nor the commissioning editors. It is not our job to decide what
goes into the publication. And it is certainly not our job to put words
into the writer's mouth, so they express views that are ours instead of
theirs.

Even
if we disagree with the writer, our job is to help them get their ideas
over in the best way possible. We don't change things out of personal
prejudice.

This
is especially important in science writing, where many of authors are
professional scientists first, and amateur writers second. But it is
also true of science journalists. And if you think a writer has got a
fact or a spelling wrong, and can't confirm it yourself, go back to the
author for checking. Don't just make a guess.

Ultimately, we need to respect our profession — even if, ironically, the
goal of our work is to end up with something that the writer can still
call their own.